egrets in our local river

Yesterday afternoon, Paula and I went for a walk down the Ng Tung River, which I usually refer to casually as ‘our local river’. This isn’t as straightforward an endeavour as it was a few years ago, largely because the construction of the so-called ‘Fanling North Bypass’ blocks progress down the one-time Drainage Services access road that once ran alongside the north bank of the river. We were on our way home when I spotted a large number of egrets through the space underneath one of the footbridges across the river:

You probably can’t see anything on this photo, so here is an enlarged version of the relevant part of the picture:

I took the next photo from the footbridge:

…followed by a series of shots as I walked along the makeshift temporary road that runs along the south bank of the river:

That was yesterday, and this morning, when walking back home from Luen Wo Hui, I reached the temporary road slightly further downstream than usual and saw another spectacular gathering of egrets:

The bridge that you can see in this photo will eventually carry the ‘bypass’.

And this a closer view of the concentration of egrets in the bottom right-hand corner of the previous photo:

I walk along the river frequently, but most of the time I don’t see any egrets, or at most two or three. Where do they go when they’re not in the river? Surely they need to feed, and there are a lot of fish in this river. I hope to find out the answer to this conundrum eventually.

a flight of fancy

The other day, I decided to walk past one of the two completed apartment blocks that will eventually form part of the Fanling North NDA (New Development Area). Apart from these blocks, this whole patch is now a no-go area, which means that in order to reach Fanling from our village, we have to take a considerable detour. However, the path that I followed on this occasion doesn’t lead anywhere useful. I just wondered whether I might see something interesting. And I did.

After passing the larger of the two completed blocks, I was surprised to discover a sequence of six images mounted on the barrier that runs alongside the path and is there to prevent access to the construction site. This is the first image (from left to right):

My first thought was that this is an ‘artist’s impression’ of what the site will look like when construction has been completed, even though it is obviously the work of a child. However, although the idea of the river as an amenity is appealing, there is no trace of the so-called ‘bypass’ currently under construction.

The next image does show what might be intended to represent the bypass, and we have seen tortoises in the river:

Nevertheless, it is also clearly not a reflection of future reality.

And neither is this, although children can certainly have a whale of a time:

The next image appears to be the most fanciful, although it does include some important clues as to what this artwork is all about:

In the background is a shopping mall—all housing estates have such a facility, although there is as yet no sign of one in the development thus far—and the blue flash near the bottom of the picture identifies the subject of this image as Hung Shui Kiu, part of the Ha Tsuen New Development Area. I suspect that this is a fictitious entity, although I don’t think that the original name of this area, Ma Shi Po (‘horseshit area’), is likely to be preserved when the development has been completed.

Incidentally, the four tent-like structures in the foreground of the image are labelled ‘Fish’, ‘Vegan’. ‘Cakes’ and ‘Organic soap’. And the ‘25th’ in the bottom right-hand corner of the image is a reference to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the handover from British rule in 1997, which appears to have been widely celebrated in Hong Kong. These images were apparently the winners in some kind of art competition in schools to mark the occasion.

An ornamental boating lake is unlikely to have been part of the plan in the development here:

The final image, of a child contemplating the setting sun, is probably the most realistic as a vision of the future:

My final photo should help to explain why all the above images are slightly skewed: the path is so narrow that I struggled to capture the entire image in a single photo at such close range:

The road in the photo is Ma Sik Road, which is a dual carriageway that in my opinion makes the new bypass currently under construction completely unnecessary.

You can also see the paintings featured above and the larger of the two new blocks in the photo. The new blocks also hint at an unanswered mystery: why are the new buildings only 20 storeys high. All the housing estates on the other side of Ma Sik Road—Green Code, Bel-Air Monte, Regentville and Union Plaza—are 40 storeys high. There are two estates downstream—Noble Hill and Hillcrest—that are only 15 storeys high, but they are quite clearly upmarket estates, while the others that I’ve mentioned are obviously more downmarket. Given that the rationale behind the NDAs is to tackle Hong Kong’s chronic housing shortage, why are the new blocks being built here not much higher?

what happened here?

Unless we decide to go for yam char, Paula and I go to Tai Fah Wut (Fairwood) in Queen’s Hill Estate for breakfast. There is only one road leading into the estate, Lung Shan Road, and a few days ago, as we were walking along the path running alongside this road, before reaching the entrance to the estate, Paula spotted this on the other side of the road:

This is an enlarged view of the previous photo:

It’s cleat that whatever vehicle flattened these four hooped railings, which are there to block access to the cycle track, was travelling from left to right; in other words, away from the estate. And ever since we saw the damage, I’ve been trying to figure out how it happened. And why?

You can see that the vehicle must have mounted the kerb only slightly, because the lamp-post, which is much more substantial than the railings, was unscathed. Any further onto the pavement and the lamp-post would have stopped the renegade vehicle in its tracks—and the second, third and fourth hoops would not have been flattened. Did a driver lose control of their vehicle? The road here is a broad curve, not an acute bend, so this hypothesis does seem unlikely:

However, my final photo contains an important clue:

Notice what appears to be some kind of hazard road sign lying on the ground in the foreground. I would conjecture that it was originally located in the hole where the brick paving has been disrupted, and it was subsequently moved to the location shown in the photo so that it didn’t impede access to the quasi-industrial premises that you can see in the first photo above (the entrance is marked by the parked car). So it appears that the culprit driver deliberately mounted the kerb, flattened four hooped railings and drove between a second lamp-post and a plastic bollard on the cycle track, flattening a hazard sign in the process. But why? Access to this site is provided, as it is for several other quasi-industrial premises along this section of the road, direct from the road. Strange!

one mystery resolved, another emerges

Back in January, I wrote about encountering a huge number of egrets in a fish pond that we pass whenever we’re cycling along San Tin Tsuen Road, which circles around San Tin to the north and west (see map below). This is a photo from that earlier post:

At the time, the fish pond appeared to be in the process of being drained—the reason wasn’t obvious—but because we always cycle along this road when we’re heading ‘out west’, we’ve noticed that significant work has been taking place, with trucks on the dried-up pond bed and what appeared to be some kind of structure being built in the middle.

On one occasion, when the pond was filling up with water again, Paula commented that the structure looked like solar panels. Although I agreed with her observation, this did seem to be a highly unlikely location for such an installation. However, work here has now finished, and several notices have appeared around the area recently. This one is located alongside the road to the right of new railings that have replaced the original wire-mesh fence between the pond and the road:

So they are solar panels! When I saw copies of this sign in other locations—some more than 2km away—I wondered why they were trumpeting a stormwater pumping station. I never had time to read the second line as I cycled past. And I didn’t realize until a few days ago that the homunculus on the left of each sign that I passed—a kind of mascot of the Drainage Services Department (DSD)—was pointing out which way to go.

In fact, it isn’t obvious what this pond has to do with pumping stormwater, although the area is flat and is probably prone to flooding. I assume that the solar panels have been installed to power any pumping that needs to be done, but where is the machinery? And where is any floodwater to be pumped to?

Although I can understand the DSD’s involvement in flood control, I fail to comprehend its motive in promoting an ‘ecological floating island’. Leaving aside the misuse of the word ‘ecological’, which I railed against in a recent post, what is the motivation here? And this is a second sign, located to the left of the sign in the above photo:

This sign implies that there is something to see here (although that something doesn’t conform to the conventional definition of a polder). These are photos that I took a few days ago of the ‘floating photovoltaic system’ from different angles:

I’m guessing that the function of the line of buoys is to carry power away from the solar panels. The last photo also shows the ‘ecological floating island’, and you will notice that there is something in the back left-hand corner. Paula reckoned that whatever it was had purple flowers.

This is a photo taken a few days earlier that shows the purple flowers more clearly:

I took the next photo yesterday, and the floating island is now fully stocked with plants, which appear to be in pots:

There are two people on the island, but I was too late to capture a third person who was wading through the water pushing an empty float that had presumably been used to ferry plants to the island. This is a closer view that shows the two workers on the island more clearly:

I don’t know whether there will be anything else to record here, but we cycle past here regularly, so I’ll be on the lookout for more changes. One thing that I can predict with reasonable confidence: we won’t see egrets in this pond again!

Location map:

an educational excursion

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been out and about looking for new examples of my favourite floral display of the year: the firecracker vine. I’ve also been visiting some of the locations I already knew about in the hope that I might be able to take some better photos than the ones I already had.

Consequently, I decided to visit the location of what I consider to be the finest single example of a firecracker vine in bloom that I already knew about (check out the first photo in Jeepers Creepers #2 to see what I mean) one day last week. This location is about 6km downstream from our village, just before the Ng Tung River flows under the main railway line into China (when the border is open), so I planned to take in a few detours as part of what was clearly going to be a long walk.

Having left behind the construction area that currently blights the upper section of the river, I decided to cut away from the river to walk through the village of Wa Shan in the hope of spotting some new examples of firecracker vines. There were none here, but I did spot one in the distance, in what is clearly a forested area:

The pink in the foreground of the first photo is provided by bougainvillea.

I wondered whether I could get a closer shot, because this vine was likely to be near ‘the top road’. I could, although there was too much vegetation for an ideal photo:

Although firecracker vines are usually to be seen adorning the perimeter fences or walls of people’s gardens, this one was clearly a wild example. Unusual, but not unique, in my experience. I wondered whether it was an escapee from someone’s garden, or whether this was its natural state.

I returned to the Drainage Services Department (DSD) access road I had been following and continued downstream. Having crossed Man Kam To Road, a major highway into China (when the border is open), I decided to have a rest at the next covered seating area, kindly provided by the Home Affairs Department despite DSD ‘keep out’ notices. When I continued, almost immediately my ears pricked up. That sounds like goats, I said to myself, so I walked over to the side of the road to see whether I was right. I was:

I also shot a video:

My first thought was “how did they manage to cross Man Kam To Road safely?” Then I realized. This was a different herd to the one we often see upstream from this highway, almost all black, with just one white individual—the other herd includes several white and brown individuals. I followed the herd as it browsed slowly along, until it reached the area in the fourth photo, which apparently had enough to eat for them to pause for a while. I continued on my way.

Opposite the first footbridge across the river downstream from Man Kam To Road, there is a path that leads through a large cluster of small houses, eventually emerging onto Fu Tei Au Road. I’ve often cycled through here, because it provides quite a stern test of one’s bike-handling skills. However, this was the first time I’d been here on foot, and therefore the first time I noticed this memorial stone:

Although it’s difficult to read after more than half a century, it commemorates a catastrophic flood in 1964, before the river was canalized, and the subsequent rebuilding efforts, which included this rather quaint brick-arch bridge over the connection between two large ponds that are currently covered in dead water hyacinths:

This path leads eventually, through quite a few twists and turns, to the firecracker vine that was the original motivation for this expedition:

The target vine is on the left; there was no vine on the right when I took the photo that I included in Jeepers Creepers #2.

This is a view looking down the path from Fu Tei Au Road:

The floral density of the vine on the roof is almost solid, but there were many more flowers above and right of the gate when I took the earlier photo. The building in the right middle distance is the Sheung Shui abattoir, the final destination for thousands of pigs from China every day.

Having taken several more photos here, which will be published later this week as part of this year’s survey of firecracker vines, I continued along Fu Tei Au Road to where it is joined by the DSD access road. My intention had been to cross a footbridge here and follow a footpath that runs alongside the slaughterhouse, but as a result of construction work here, unrelated to the construction in our neighbourhood, the path was blocked, so I had to backtrack along the DSD road instead.

This turned out to be a serendipitous move. After a short distance, I knew that I could join a path that runs parallel to the DSD road, and almost immediately that I did so, something in the distance caught my attention. From that distance, it appeared like printed material, because the colours were so bright, but it turned out, unexpectedly, to be a fascinating mural painted onto a brick wall:

It’s well worth taking a closer look:

I hadn’t realized at the time I took the photos that this is one contiguous scene, although I did notice that it was painted across a buttress in the wall, and the next buttress along was unpainted, thus separating this scene from a completely different scene further to the right.

You might think that the calendar on the wall is displaying a completely arbitrary date, but thanks to the plethora of homophones in the Chinese language, ‘two three’ sounds like ‘easy to accumulate riches’. The character on the calendar means ‘blessings’ and is seen everywhere around the time of the new year. This is clearly a new year scene, given the four-character invocations pasted on each side of the window. The one on the left means ‘one group happy’ (implying no arguments), while the one on the right means ‘plenty of money’.

Other things to note in this scene: the boy on the right is busy doing his homework, but the boy stealing around the buttress in the foreground, who should probably be doing his homework too, is more keen to join the two smaller children playing marbles. Note too the old-fashioned cathode ray tube television, and the collection of (presumably empty) wine bottles on the top shelf.

The right-hand painting is even more intriguing:

This photo was taken two days after my initial visit, partly because I’d inadvertently chopped quite a lot off the right-hand side of the image because I couldn’t get far enough away, given the width of the alleyway here, but mainly because I wanted Paula to see the mural (we waited two days because we’d planned to go out cycling on the intervening day, and given the dubious weather recently, that was a date that couldn’t be changed).

Paula was particularly amused by her observation that while the humans in this image are working hard (threshing rice, polishing rice, harvesting vegetables, fishing), the cat and the cow are taking it easy:

Incidentally, I haven’t seen rice being grown in Hong Kong since the 1970s, although I do recognize the threshing box being used to separate the rice grains from the rest of the plant.

It was only when I looked at the photo after we got home that it occurred to me that although it looks like a domestic pussy cat, the animal on the left is actually a tiger (and it’s slurping an ice cream cone), and cows are oxen (this cow is sipping a milk shake). And we are about to exit the Year of the Ox at midnight tonight, to be followed by the Year of the Tiger. So this part of the mural also has a new year significance, and I think that it must have been painted very recently, given the freshness of the colours.

By the way, I can’t explain the fish swimming in a pink sky, so if anyone can, please leave a comment.

Another thing I didn’t notice on my initial visit, but Paula did:

Easy to miss if you’re walking towards the camera: the sign reads ‘seven colours [rainbow?] ancient well’. The arrow points up a narrow alley, and of course we had to see where it led. It turned out to be a proverbial ‘blind alley’, but I noticed this painted plaque on one sidewall, just before the end:

The characters are the same as on the arrow, reading top, bottom, right, left. And the well is located in the left-hand corner at the end of the alley, surrounded on the two open sides by stainless steel railings:

Clearly, this well is no longer used as a source of water, but I wonder why it was considered ‘colourful’. I can only conjecture that evaporation of water from the well, combined with refraction of light through water vapour, somehow created a rainbow effect. I also wonder why its existence is both signposted and commemorated by a plaque, especially as very few people pass this way, even on the DSD access road. And I didn’t realize that Fu Tei Au is a village—there are no modern three-storey village houses here, or a public toilet—although perhaps I should have guessed, given that named roads in the New Territories tend to lead to wherever the road is named after.

I wasn’t about to return home the same way, so I crossed the river via the footbridge opposite the memorial stone, which leads to the road into the abattoir. I wasn’t paying attention, but when I came this way with Paula, she quickly spotted a truckload of pigs on their final journey. After that, I counted four more trucks carrying doomed pigs in the five minutes it took us to reach Po Wan Road. I may not have been paying attention to traffic on the road, but I couldn’t help but notice this on the opposite side of the road:

The question is almost too obvious to ask: how do you polish effluent? The logo on the right is that of the DSD. And there is another question. The boundary here appears to be a hedge, but notice that the letters are quite wobbly. How were they fixed to the hedge, which doesn’t appear to have obscured a single letter?

The rectangle on the left appears to be a site map superimposed on an aerial photograph:

I think that there may be other intriguing mysteries and talking points further left along the boundary fence, so I will probably be back at some time to take a closer look.

Meanwhile, on Po Wan Road:

I was tempted to shrug and say to myself “well, this is Hong Kong!”, and at least there is almost no traffic, but it isn’t possible to cross to the other side until the road changes from a dual to a single carriageway. And these are big articulated wagons blocking the pavement. I wonder how often the police check this road for illegal parking.

After a short distance along Po Wan Road, it’s possible to detour into a park next to the moat around part of Wai Loi Tsuen, which I wrote about in Historical Sites in Sheung Shui, where I came across this structure:

Gazebos are common in small parks all over the New Territories, but this is something rather more grand. It obviously has a religious significance, hence the rectangular box filled with sand, used to plant burning joss sticks, and the square structure on the left, used to burn paper representations of useful objects, like a motor car, that a deceased person could use in the afterlife.

Incidentally, you may think that the swept-up profile of the roof is a mere idiosyncrasy of Chinese architecture, but if a flying demon lands on the roof, it will slide down the roof and be swept back into the air. Makes sense.

My route home then follows a path between the moat and the houses where the walls of Wai Loi Tsuen, which were around 8 metres high, once stood:

Admittedly, I took this photo, looking back the way I’d just come, for the bougainvillea rather than to illustrate this excursion.

And I took this photo of the Liu Man Shek Tong Ancestral Hall as evidence that we were indeed approaching the new year:

Notice the pots of kumquats, popular at this time as a symbol of prosperity, and the pots of yellow flowers on each side of the door, which are probably chrysanthemums.

Having encountered a previously unknown herd of goats on my outward journey, it was probably inevitable that we would bump into our local herd when I repeated the route with Paula:

We actually spotted them some distance downstream, but they were herded along by a couple of day trippers in cars—the pre-construction route was inaccessible to motor vehicles. They would probably have wandered off to the right much earlier than they did, and when they did squeeze through the gaps in the barriers, they would have faced a barren landscape with almost nothing to eat.

At least I could have a cold beer when I got home, which isn’t far from where this last photo was taken.